


The Sins of the Fathers

by ObsessedtwibrarianOTB



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dystopia, Flash Fic, Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-29
Updated: 2016-03-29
Packaged: 2018-05-29 23:21:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6398374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObsessedtwibrarianOTB/pseuds/ObsessedtwibrarianOTB
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once again the sons must pay for the sins of the fathers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sins of the Fathers

**First Line** ("Ssh, let me listen.") taken from: _Bits & Pieces: a Rot & Ruin Novel_ by Jonathan Maberry

 

“Ssh, let me listen.”

He rolled his eyes. “You bought another one of those recordings??”

“It only cost me an eighth a cord of firewood,” she said defensively.

 _Our firewood?! Fuck._ His mother’s obsession with rain was definitely abnormal, but he understood the reason for it: the silence in their life was deafening. It snowed in the Northeast—their home—nearly every day; he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d heard the sound of real rain. Those ancient devices—iPods as they were once known—were his mother’s only link to a past that was long gone. If you had anything valuable to trade, you could snatch a few moments of nostalgic joy listening to music, books, and even the sounds of nature—like rain—and escape the horrors of the present for a little while.

“Mom, I have something important to tell you.”

She sighed, turned away from the pot cooking over the fire, and touched the iPod, plunging the room into our normal silence.

“I’m volunteering for the North American Resettlement Program. I want you to go live with the Shorters. They still have a lot of trees left on their land and plenty of food. You’ll have to help with the chores, but you’ll be safe and warm there.”

Anguish overtook her time-worn features. “Derek, NO! You can’t!”

“Mom–“

She interrupted, her panic drowning out her common sense. “We can go south, where there’s rain and it’s warmer! Or the West! I hear they have electricity there, and it never snows!”

“The South is flooded, Mom. If you don’t drown, the dysentery will kill you. And the West has been in drought my whole lifetime. They’re murdering each other over what little water is left.”

We’d had this same discussion so many times that I knew what was coming next.

She raked her hand through her premature gray hair. “We can go to Europe then, the Swiss Republic. I’ve heard nothing’s changed there. They have electricity, music, the theater, indoor plumbing and heating, and they grow their own food.”

“Most of Europe is underwater, and no one can get into the Republic unless you have connections or lots of money, and we don’t have either one. They’re shooting anyone who tries to sneak in,” I said.

Her lips thinned. “This is President Alvarez’s fault,” she sneered. “That brown monkey doesn’t give two shits about us white folks.”

He shook his head, exasperated. His mother wore her racial prejudice like a badge of honor, except the world’s problems had nothing to do with race anymore. It was humanity’s ignorance, greed and lust for power that had put the ink on Earth’s death certificate.

“NARP is my… _our_ …only option, Mother!” he snapped.

“Sending you into space to find an inhabitable planet??” She cackled bitterly. “It’s madness, Derek! We could fix _all_ of this if we could just get that wetback out of Washington.”

His mother was in denial. The planet was beyond fixing—her generation and the three before it had made sure of that. All the U.S. did these days was play the blame game and talk in circles. _That_ was madness. It was NARP—a project originating out of South America—that was actually working to find a solution. It was ridiculed as a pipe dream and a needless waste of this nation’s precious youth, but Derek, and other young men and women like him, saw it as humanity’s only hope.

History was a bitch of a mistress.

The sins of the fathers were once again going to have to be paid by their sons.

 

 


End file.
